Crowdsourcing the City

A groundbreaking event held on April 24 2018 at The Urban Innovation Centre in Clerkenwell, London. The event organized by NewCities in partnership with Mistra Urban Futures and Future Cities Catapult, with the participation of Spacehive, Project for Public Spaces, Living Space Project, and the Young Foundation.

NewCities and its partners brought together the policymakers from more than 20 cities alongside 100 of the most insightful actors in community development, planning, design, real estate, technology, social innovation, and finance. Through interactive workshops, panel presentations and high-level discussions, the gathering defined the emerging tools within civic crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and their capacity in grassroots, public, and private use-cases as a formal tool for developing and enhancing civic spaces and community assets.

The interactive day-long discussion:

Emphasized civic environment as a latent resource for public, private, and local development stakeholders; Highlighted concrete civic crowdfunding initiatives from around the world;

Explored crowd urbanism as an emerging tool for ‘sensing the city’ with the potential to fill in the gaps between big-ticket items in profit-driven development;

Connected stakeholders and the non-traditional actors that should be involved in the future development and implementation of crowd urbanism projects;

Determined and defined the necessary tools and potential in mainstreaming the use of crowd urbanism for private developers, urban designers, city planners, philanthropy, and the smart-city industry.